Food is at the heart of every culture but our cookery heritage is often neglected in favor of our obsession with the new. With your help we hope to rediscover the secrets of those great (and not so great) cooks and share them with each other.

Monday, 28 January 2013

A prolific writer of cookery books

We tend to think of the current era as the heyday for cookery so it comes as a surprise to discover that one hundred years ago was also a boom time for food manufacturers, publishers and authors and few were more prolific than Charles Herman Senn.

Charles Herman Senn was born in Switzerland, in 1864 and died in 1934. He received a classical cookery training in Europe and later under the renowned chef Francatelli at the Reform Club in London. Senn was one of the founders of the Universal Cookery and Food Association and edited the association’s year-book, The Cookery Annual, from its first publication in 1894. In 1892 he was made Consulting Chef to the National Training School for Cookery, one of the most influential schools of its time, he was also a leading light in the Westminster Technical Institute from its founding in 1910, creating the syllabus and establishing the examinations. He also lectured and gave cookery demonstrations to the wider community.

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About Me

As a child I watched my mother and grandmother prepare and cook fresh, wholesome food and as an adult I have done the same. My own grown up kids are continuing this family tradition albeit with occasional fast food lapses. Nowadays I run a design and publishing business just outside Cambridge, UK but in the past I was art director of Good Housekeeping magazine and Time-Life Books where I was closely involved with The Good Cook, a series of more than 20 wonderful books, written by the late Richard Olney. We had our own purpose built photo studio and test kitchen and the raison-d’être of each book was to record the preparation and cooking of just about every food. This was not a job that encouraged a healthy waistline as at the end of each photo shoot we ate the “props”.

In the village where I live I have a friend who runs our local butchers shop, renowned locally as it has its own slaughter house where small scale farmers bring in their stock in one’s and two’s. Another friend owns the last remaining orchard in what was once a major fruit growing area. He specialises in heritage varieties of apples, plums and pears and makes his own excellent cider. We also have a micro brewery nearby that brews the best real ale that I have ever tasted and believe me, I have tasted a lot!

I run a publishing company CookeryClassics.com that re-purposes old cookery books for the tablet age. We hope that this will give them another lease of life and introduce them to a new generation of cooks.